[Shop-talk] Re laser range finder

[Nolan]

Once upon a time, way back before Windows, I wrote a silly little Basic 
program that was a worm crawling around on the computer screen.  It used 
random number generators to locate the worm, and to control the motion of 
the worm.

Turned out to be a fantastic program for demonstrating how orderly the 
random numbers a computer generates are.  The digits might differ, but the 
pattern of number generation always stayed the same for a given computer.

As a simple example, the worm might start anywhere, but would invariably 
curve to the right on a particular computer.  Or perhaps go forward, and 
then reverse itself on another.  Whatever the pattern was, it would 
invariably be repeated.  Eventually the noise would increase until the 
deviation was sufficient that the path was substantially different, but it 
would take a number of iterations before that would show up.

I spent quite a bit of time twiddling with that program trying to get it to 
truly randomize the number selection, but I never succeeded.

Been a long time since I thought of that old worm program and what it showed 
me about how non-random and orderly computers generate random numbers.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Doug Braun" <doug at dougbraun.com>
To: "David Scheidt" <dmscheidt at gmail.com>; "Shop-Talk List" 
<shop-talk at autox.team.net>
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 12:38 AM
Subject: Re: [Shop-talk] Re laser range finder


> BTW, here is another pre-internet math/engineering
> classic I would buy in an instant if the price were
> right:
>
> http://www.wps.com/projects/million/index.html
>
> Doug